Just got back from my 20th high school reunion. Some high points from the weekend:
The day before I left, my sometimes coworker Nick popped by the office after renewing his passport in Soho. For whatever reason, the officers there frisked him, and found a tiny knife he uses as a bartender's tool – legal to carry, but still, not a big hit with the government employees. “That's strike one,” they said, even though he wouldn't be boarding a plane for a month. When they saw his miniature-pistol belt buckle, they got even angrier – “That's strike
two.”
I was not frisked upon renewing my passport, even though I was sporting a year-in-the-making terrorist beard. Flying to Dallas Thursday, the TSA agent stared at my pic in disbelief, but only because the beard had been a bad idea. “You look much better without it”, she advised, without raising the alert level to...orange? Nick's hair is pretty much orange; if he's any kind of terrorist, it's IRA. So much for ethnic profiling.
I read most of a GQ on the way down. Did you know that Sly Stallone has tattoos now? Did you know that Sly Stallone didn't have tattoos when his shirtless torso captured America's heart in the 70s, 80s, and kind of 90s? I think this one is of his wife though. It's fine to get a late-life tattoo to commemorate/honor something, so long as you're not just doing it to stay relevant in your post-Judge Dredd years.
Touching down in Dallas, I learned that a close friend and his wife also got tattoos, Roman numerals commemorating the date of their marriage – except the artist screwed up and inked the wrong numerals. Fortunately they caught the mistake; had it been Chinese numerals, no one would ever have known. Except the Chinese.
Great story told the first night over pork chops and grilled okra: another old friend (25 years of shenanigans) got a call from Washington state, from his old work colleague's husband, who he was never all that close with. “I heard you've been killing hogs with machine guns. That's just not right, man. I'm afraid I'm going to have to call the ATF.” My friend reminded the guy that in Texas, hogs are a destructive force of nature, and it's legal to kill them in whatever manner you prefer,
even mowing them down from a helicopter (actually according to this video that might still have to be part of a state-sanctioned eradication program, but you can definitely kill some fucking pigs). Later he called the guy's wife, quickly moving from pleasantries to what-the-fuck. “Yeah, he was really upset about the hogs. He says he's not going to call the ATF anymore, but he does want to talk about what would be a fair amount of money for you guys to give him for not calling them.” Apparently moving to Washington is not the best thing for your sanity.
Nor is staying in Texas: my buddy then related how after the A&M-Arkansas game the week before, our friend's Aggie fraternity brother yelled “go back home and fuck your cousin!” to a passing carload of Razorbacks. Then a post-college friend ran after the car and menaced its passengers with a folding chair. Then my guy grabbed his crotch and asked the Razorbacks, then emerging from the car, if they maybe didn't want to lick his balls. A girl sprinted out of the Arkansas gaggle, and punched another friend in the face. Then out of nowhere an Aggie fan who was friends with nobody ran into the thick of it and started screaming about how he was a Green Beret and he wasn't going to put up with disrespect like that from a bunch of
“Woooo...pig-sooie!” rednecks. I think things broke up after that – get to a certain age, and the last person you want on your side is someone who actually knows how to fight, and actually wants to.
The next day we hit the State Fair. Three Shiners and the auto show. No rides. Also convinced some women grimacing over their basket of fried beer pockets to donate a few to us, so we didn't have to buy our own just to say we'd tried it. They looked like little raviolis, and tasted like hot, watery light lager. Sometimes skipping a second corn dog in favor of the annual deep-fried experiment pays off; this wasn't one of those times.
After the Fair, we picked up Mark Baker's drums at his Expo Park studio, threw them in back of my buddy's truck, and hauled them over to the Friday night reunion venue. I hadn't seen Mark Baker in almost 20 years. He now boasts more than a few tattoos, and must have hit a growth spurt late in college. Mark ended up being Ministry's last drummer before they broke up. That night he was reuniting with his first band, the Suburbans, a truly quality high school group whose style could not be described as “industrial metal”.
That night our friend who works for the Cowboys secured us the Official Team Fun Bus. I don't know how much XS Energy Drink and vodka I consumed, but probably a lot. Back outside the bus after eating at Manny's Tex-Mex, this little kid decided we actually were Dallas Cowboys, and started taking pictures of us as we were taking pictures of ourselves. Then he hopped on the bus and took a few shots of the interior. I'm pretty sure he was the only person all night who mistook us for football players, even though we did all play football.
For some semblance of brevity, a few paragraphs from now I'll merge the things I learned Friday night with the things I learned Saturday night, except I will go ahead and mention that Friday 1) I got really drunk and never left the bar area for the main floor, and 2)
Gary Fulkerson has become an accomplished singer-songwriter in Bend, Oregon. Says the
Bend Bulletin: “Fulkerson’s songs are deep and layered, with understated vocals and sharp acoustic guitar work, plus an edge that’s indicative of Neil Young." I should've moved closer to the stage to listen, but since I was positioned mere feet away from the complimentary beer, I kept on rocking in the free world.
The next day some guys got together on the Barley House deck to drain buckets and watch UT-Nebraska and Rangers-Yankees, plus bonus action from Arkansas-Auburn and SMU-Navy. A guy from the class ahead of us was there, a former o-lineman who ended up at both Navy and SMU, and who's pretty much the best guy any of us know. A lot of the guys he hung out with in high school didn't make their reunion. One of them did friend him on Facebook. Looking at his profile, he learned that his old friend had a 22-year-old kid, kind of disconcerting since they graduated in '89.
Talked with our own team's qb for a while. From 4th grade on, everyone knew he'd end up starting varsity, and back in 4th grade, his temper was too volatile for most kids his age to comprehend, especially on those occasions his teams lost. Which wasn't often: his YMCA squad beat us like 56-6 one year, and almost as bad the next. But then in 6th grade we tied them 6-6 when our linebacker solo-stuffed their running back on a goal-line sweep. My team maintained that the kissing-your-sister result had actually made our future high school field general cry. We, on the other hand, were very proud of the tie – we started off sucking, and this was the apex of our 3-year climb to not-totally-sucking.
I doubt he actually cried. He probably just blurted out some frustration, and our little 6-man squad made the most humbling interpretation possible and ran with it. I do know that we had no idea the kind of pressure he must have been under at the time. Back then, we still played teams like Odessa Permian and Dallas Carter in the playoffs, and even though we seemed impossibly young at that moment of semi-victory, high school was only a few years ahead, and some parents were already plotting how that would play out. My folks were just happy I was playing sports at all, and not getting even fatter watching black & white monster movies on the couch. But given the heat put on by a lot of parents – not to mention coaches, former players, and random neighborhood jackasses – a Friday Night Lights comparison isn't out of order, at least as far as crushing expectations go.
He ended up excelling in five sports, and people still rib him about the “Congratulations to Our 5-Star Athlete” ad taken out in our football program. He handles the ribbing gracefully. These days, he's got two little boys, both of whom he coaches. One's an instinctual athlete – not the fastest or the strongest, he just feels the game, and until you hit the NFL combine (and sometimes even after that) that's all that matters. The other's already a voracious reader, knows everything there is to know about sports, and loves playing, but probably won't end up being one of the great ones. His dad seemed perfectly happy with this, almost serene.
All right, so now, the guy in the kilt: I wasn't there for this part, but on Thursday, a certain member of our class who has apparently “retired” from...nobody's quite sure what, showed up at an informal warm-up happy hour and announced that on Saturday he'd be competing in the Scottish Games to set the world record at hurling some sort of traditional heavy missile, like, 11 feet. Sure enough, he shows up Saturday night rocking a formal black kilt. I asked him if he'd done whatever; he kept walking and over his shoulder affirmed that he had. I asked if he'd set that record, but he never looked back. I would've asked if he was wearing anything under that kilt, because you know what they say about Scotsmen, but honestly, I'm not even sure if he's Scottish.
Did I mention our team name was the Scots? Anyway, this stuff also happened:
Duncan, who I used to cheat off in AP Physics, came out a while back, and's been with the same guy for 18 years. “That's longer than my parents were together”, I said. “Mine too”, he said.
A very drunk individual I haven't seen in years told me “You know __ and his wife are swingers, right? She'll grab your balls and put something in your ass if you're not careful.” I think he was fucking with me, but hopefully he wasn't – not because I want someone's wife to put something in my ass, but because you want your classmates to turn out as diverse as possible. Life's just better that way, and plus when someone says “Your high school was a bunch of boring white people” you can reply “Yeah, boring white people whose wives will put something in your ass.”
Another guy's wife told me he sat on a bulldozer and cried while watching a construction crew tear down his childhood home. Mine was built in 1912 (ancient in Dallas, comparable to Pilgrim cabins up Northeast), and a few years ago was the last old house on the block to get flattened. I would have cried too, if I'd been there to see it. I won't go on and on about the place, but I will say it had a grated floor furnace I used to drop army men into to watch the plastic luminously melt, and that the kid who had my room before we moved in left a small orange Zig-Zag sticker on the middle of three windows, and for some reason I'd assumed the bearded mascot was Shakespeare.
One of my classmates is now the Executive Director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. That's a weird card to have in your wallet. I slid it right behind the card I got from this pleasant borderline-elderly guy I met standing outside La Colombe coffee on Lafayette, openly scoping at young girls in that way only 68-year-olds can get away with (“You see those boots? Those boots were made for walking”). He was in advertising, and his company logo was a flying camel. My wallet is this laminated-plastic job depicting a cartoon, ink-spitting octopus set against an aqua sea, a random gift from a friend who once stealthily hung a naked portrait of himself in the MOMA. I guess that NRCC card feels pretty weird too, surrounded by flying camels and octopi.
Best excerpt from the Back By Popular Demand reunion yearbook:
When I grew up, I wanted to be: a child psychologist, specialty in play theory.
Instead I now: pay a psychologist to make me more childlike so I can PLAY a game for a living.
-- Harrison Frazer, PGA pro
The oddest: in his “Guests at my fantasy dinner would include” response, someone picked the most affably self-destructive guy in our class – doing hash with him could warm your heart the same way eating warm pie with a Rockwellian grandfather could – #1, and Winston Churchill #2. Neither showed up to the reunion.
My football girl still has the t-shirt with my number on it. Apparently it's gotten too soft to throw away. And, one of my teammates who couldn't be there sent the whole team DVDs of some VHS highlights he'd saved. My d-line coach (nickname: “The Tall Cool One”), who once told us “you guys might as well be jacking off behind the backstop!”, is apparently on there bragging about how much I bench-pressed – probably because I was too undersized/chronically injured for him to brag about my play. After I got hurt the last time (ankle – shitty, but better than the back/knee), our junior defensive end slid over to my noseguard spot, and another junior took his spot. Our line got a lot better after that; I think my coach knew it would weeks earlier, and let me start five games anyway. There's a lot of pressure on these coaches too; running a 3-4 defense and not going with your best three so a senior can have his day...well, maybe he wasn't such a son of a bitch after all.
I made it through the entire weekend without anybody forgetting who I was, except one girl who I think had me confused for a guy built sort of like me who ended up going to jail after robbing the same bank for the third time – no gun, just hand-in-pocket, and he was actually successful the first two attempts, but on that third, the police followed him home to his parents' house. I saw him after he got out, working as a host at California Pizza Kitchen. He'd lost 50lbs. I told him he looked great, and he smiled and said, “Well, you know, prison.” My own 50 added pounds have bloated away any resemblance I might have had to the bank robber in his current condition, but I guess this girl hadn't seen him, and had no idea how ripped jail could make a dude.
I was among the last standing at the afterparty on the Common Table's patio. Actually, I was sitting, drinking bourbon and smoking. It's possible a lot of people I won't see for a very long time now think I'm a smoker. At 3am, an hour past Dallas closing, __ wanted the rest of us to keep rolling, to a bar he said served late-night. A few people wavered. One girl was into it, but only if everyone else was. Our class president was very enthusiastic. __, one of he most rockingly charismatic guys in our class and just an all-around good-if-struggling soul, is a bad-ass guitarist who very freely admits he's had problems over the years with drugs you've never tried. Our class president, who looks exactly like Ricky Schroeder (seriously, if Ricky Schroeder was Saddam Hussein, our class president would have been his senior body double), was really excited about keeping the night going. He doesn't do drugs – never did as far as I know – and is happily married, but his wife had headed home around 2am, and he was just energized by all his hard work bringing so many walking memories together.
In the end, we called it an evening – I had a noon flight, and most everyone else had kids who'd be waking them up in a few hours. This seems overly poetic, but as I hopped in my ride's SUV, I really did see __ ambling east into the night, and our class president walking west. To absolutely ruin this poetic ending, I forced my ride to stop by the 24-7 Dickey's Drive-Thru at the Shell station, where I got three breakfast tacos. They were fantastic, but apparently this woman with a pencil-thin mustache makes the best ones, and she wasn't working. But even if things weren't as absolutely perfect as they could've been, it was good to be home. If you're thinking of skipping your reunion because of old resentments or fears or laziness or whatever, quit being such a vagina. You might miss a guy in a kilt.
Probably because they were high. On the ecstasy. “I share everything, except my pills!” said the louder one (the other one was so quiet I had to ask if he was rolling too, or just babysitting – his tiny terrorist fist bump affirmed that, yes, he was rolling too). Pretty quickly he was offering me his girlfriend. Her not being around, he quickly threw his steak into the deal. “Have my steak, cool guy!” he screamed. “If you don't eat your steak, how can you have any pudding? How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your steak!” 
